George Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey on 5th
July, 1918. An accomplished pianist who worked his way through college playing
in jazz bands in New York City, he began formal studies of composition in 1939
at the Mannes School of Music under Hans Weisse, George Szell and Leopold
Mannes. He was seriously wounded during wartime service in Europe, subsequently
resuming his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1945
with Rosario Scalero. From 1951 he was Director of Publications for the music
publishing house Theodore Presser, in 1960 becoming Chairman of the Music
Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1979 he was designated
Annenberg Professor of the Humanities, retiring from the University in 1983.

Rochberg’s music has been honoured since his earliest
substantial compositions, his Night Music receiving the George Gershwin
Memorial Award in 1953. Since then, Naumberg Recording Awards, Guggenheim
Fellowships, Honorary Doctorates, a Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome,
and Fulbright Scholarship in 1950-51 (the year in which he met and befriended
Luigi Dallapiccola), the ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and
countless other honours have accumulated in ever greater profusion. In 1996 his
manuscripts and papers were acquired for the archives at the Paul Sacher
Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.

The key that will open George Rochberg’s music to the
willing, the curious, but especially to the “innocent” ear, lies not in the
conventional wisdom that declares him the first “post modernist” for his
openness to a complex mix of musical languages, but rather in seeking to enter
the composer’s extraordinary understanding of the nature of time.

As long ago as 1963, Rochberg, in The New Image of Music,
wrote that the successive revolutions of twelve-tone composition and of the
post-war avant-garde had brought about a liberation that “permits sounds to
create their own context”. This liberation of sound from tonal harmonic
functions, led to “the overthrow of a long-dominant temporal structure”; to a
world in which conglomerates of pure sound are able to interact in ways that
are not necessarily hidebound by structural considerations.

“Subjective man,” writes Rochberg, “views existence as
change; himself and his history at the center of a process of becoming..
Subjective man cannot transcend time; he is trapped in it. However, when man
seizes on the present moment of existence as the only ‘real’ time, he
spatializes his existence; that is, he fills his present with objects that take
on … a state of permanence.” Thus did the composer allow broader means of expression
to be added to his vocabulary, constantly enlarging it, making possible what he
later came to call an “all-at once world”.

By 1959, Rochberg was lionized as America’s first and
greatest master of composition in a serial language. His 1955-56 Second
Symphony, taken up and enthusiastically given its première by George Szell,
seemed to lay out a path for him as one of the leaders of the American
avant-garde, and yet, not even three years after its première, he was
rethinking his language, already dissatisfied with the limitations of
expressivity of the strict twelve-tone environment. Having mastered the idiom,
he was far ahead of his time in seeking to go beyond it.

The oft-repeated assertion that it was predominantly
personal tragedy that led Rochberg to abandon dodecaphony and embrace tonality,
is not entirely borne out by the facts. His evolution towards a multiplicity of
simultaneous languages was already well in train from his earliest
compositions. Rochberg speaks of his use of twelve-tone techniques as
engendering a “hard” Romanticism (kin, perhaps, to the works of Alban Berg) -
one has only to look at the slow movement of the Second Symphony, Rochberg’s
“serial” work par excellence, to see that the tone row yields music that
alternates between melting, elegiac beauty and desperate explosions of anguish,
ebullient self-confidence and profound tragedy. George Rochberg’s relationship
with the past is thus not one of nostalgia: it is one of intimate, living
familiarity. Indeed, he has said, in Reflections on the Renewal of Music,
“History will not help us; but the past, which is ever-present, can”. One
recalls, too, William Faulkner’s dictum : “the past - it is not even past!”

Rochberg is never about regret, borrowing or quotation (even
if only quotation “in kind”). The Universal Mind, which is there to be embraced
by a composer humble enough to deny ego and the flawed search for “originality”
at all costs, transcends Time and Space. Denying individualism, seeing the
creative artist as a representative of the endless procession of the human
condition, the purveyor of our collective memory, allows the composer to gather
the entirety of experience into a single, integrated language. “The hope of
contemporary music”, writes Rochberg, “lies in learning how to reconcile all
manner of opposites, contradictions, paradoxes; the past with the present,
tonality with atonality. That is why, in my most recent music, I have tried to
utilize these in combinations which reassert the primal values of music.”

In the words of the Washington Post,

“Rochberg presents the rare spectacle of a composer who has
made his peace with tradition while maintaining a strikingly individual profile
…… he succeeds in transforming the sublime concepts of traditional music into
contemporary language.”

George Rochberg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra has been
one of his most frequently heard and most enthusiastically received works,
being played 47 times by Isaac Stern, who instigated its commission, between
1975 and 1977. Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in memory of
Donald Steinfirst, esteemed music critic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was
also recorded by Stern and that orchestra under André Previn in 1977. The
seventh of that long run of performances took place at Carnegie Hall on 14th
April, 1975, to a sold-out audience, many of whom had formed a queue around the
block as far as 56th Street, seeking last-minute tickets. Puzzlingly, it was
following this enormously successful performance that Isaac Stern began to
request changes that resulted eventually in cuts totalling some fourteeen
minutes. The influential violinist felt that the work was “too long and taxing,
both for the violinist and for the audience”. Consequently, the composer’s
manuscript reads like a litany of frustration and fatigue; the score ultimately
signed as a “final” version in June 1976, carries no less than seven corrected
and crossed-out dates of completion. Nineteen pages of score, in all, were
deleted, not to speak of adjustments (simplifications) of quadruple stops,
rewriting of some solo material into the orchestra, and so on.

I had been dimly aware that the work had undergone some
changes at Stern’s instigation, but it was only when the Naxos project got
under way and I began to prepare in earnest that the dimensions of the work’s
dismemberment became apparent. Late in 2000, Rochberg’s former composition
student, the composer Stephen Jaffe, told me how anguished George had been at
the time of the early performances of the Violin Concerto. Armed with the
determination that this gave me, I proposed a possible restoration of the
“original version” of the score. Rochberg reacted as if a long-lost friend had
turned up from prisoner-of-war camp, a mixture of caution with intense excitement,
hardly daring to believe the possibility, with a rushing back of love for
something believed lost.

To my astonishment, lengthy investigations revealed that
merely a single copy of the complete score survives. Rochberg had long since
given his entire archive to public institutions, and latterly, to the Paul
Sacher Foundation in Basel. I hastily copied the missing segments into pencil
short score over a couple of days, and promptly mailed these to Rochberg. His
response was immediate and unequivocal : “Put it all back!” As I commenced this
task, beyond merely restoring cuts I recognised that some of the changes were
indeed “improvements”, the kind of minor adjustments almost every composer
makes after a first set of performances (most famously Mahler, to his
publisher’s and engraver’s dismay). Therefore I consulted closely with George
Rochberg at every stage, to arrive at a conflated score that represents his
final wishes. By January 2002 I was able to begin to produce orchestral
materials, that would be used at the triumphant public première of the restored
score, with the composer present,at the Kongresshalle, Saarbrücken, on March 17th, 2002. At this stage,
too, close collaboration with Peter Sheppard Skærved was both inspiring and
utterly invaluable. Nothing is impossible for this marvellous musician, who
seeks out the composer’s vision, comprehends it, and will spare no amount of
perspiration to hear it realised.

The Concerto for Violin is perhaps the perfect expression of
Rochberg’s dialectic between a twelve-tone “hard” Romanticism and an elegiac,
lyrical, tonal manner : the whole expressive, yet never indulgent; passionate,
yet stringently argued. In the old Stern recording, the first and fifth
movements open in the same way, with the soloist’s overarching, anguished cry
to attention. The restored opening to the fifth movement postpones this
altercation, making of it a Brucknerian “reversed recapitulation” that grows
out of tutti material that has only been heard once before, some forty minutes
earlier, and the way is prepared, too, for the gorgeous circling and rising
triplet figure with which the soloist will bring some sense of resolution to
this mammoth work.

This Concerto is in its entirety more true to the concept of
this tortured form than almost any work in the repertoire; never a display
piece, the soloist can be compared to the lone voice of humanity pitting itself
against the cosmos, which is uncaring because unaware, therefore neither bad
nor good, merely neutral. The violinist alternately leads and pleads, yells his
anguish and anger, subdues the mass of instruments, whips them up into a fury
again. The beautiful ending is one of resignation and quiet; no-one has “won”,
but something ineffable has been revealed.

Christopher Lyndon-Gee

I first heard Rochberg’s Violin Concerto when I was a
ten-year-old, in the classic Stern recording. From the first outburst from
Stern’s fiddle, the ‘great barbaric yawp’ which begins the concerto, I was
transfixed, and terrified. It suddenly dawned on me that I had absolutely no
idea what went on in the world of music, the world beyond my school, beyond the
suburbs in which I was growing up. Until I heard the Rochberg Concerto, I never
realised that the violin could be so aggressive, sexual, rhapsodic, pleading,
bullying, warlike, sentimental, or so damn frightening. This was my
introduction to the music of my time, my first clue that there was a real world
out there, beyond the leafy suburbs where I was growing up.

I was aware even then, however, that there was some kind of
problem with the work as I heard it. Whilst I could call to mind any of the
dynamic coups de théâtre, timbres and lush melody of the concerto, I simply
could not recall the order things arrived. My puzzlement increased studying Rochberg’s
music, and later through meeting and working with him. George will sing every
note of his works, illustrated with bird-like hand-waving, in order to ensure
that he really gets the shapes, the drama and intensity that his music demands.
He will hold an anacrusis in the air between finger and thumb, as you play,
daring you to be the first to break the line or betray an emotion. For
Rochberg, just as for Bartók, Beethoven or Frank Martin, the tiniest and
largest gestures bear the same fundamental imprimatur, just as the signature of
a beautiful rugged coastline is fundamentally constant, seen from whatever
altitude.

It was a great relief to receive the reconstituted concerto
from Christopher Lyndon-Gee. Instead of a series of colourful tableaux, a sweep
of inevitable development was revealed, not unlike Beethoven’s Op. 131 Quartet,
Sibelius’ Voces Intimæ or indeed, George’s own Third Quartet. It suddenly made
sense. Along with this restoration of structural unity, came out a coherence
that had eluded me in the past, the sense of prolepsis, a natural ebb and flow
to the drama. This lent ease to learning this giant, rendering even the most
fearsome precipices approachable, even inviting, and revealing to me the
intimacy that is at the heart of this monumental work.